What’s New at Moving Image London? Lots!

The Moving Image Art Fair’s London participant list is out and they’re listing a largely new roster of participants. Of the 31 exhibitors, nine will return from the fair’s iterations in London and New York. These include Winkleman Gallery (whose owners Murat Orozobekov and Edward Winkleman founded the fair), Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, AV-Arkki, STAMPA, P·P·O·W, Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, DODGE Gallery, Galerie M + R Fricke, and Mark Moore Gallery.

Many fairs see a consistent list of exhibitors return year after year, so we asked Murat Orozobekov, the co-founder of the Moving Image Art Fair, the reason for the turnover. “Mostly it’s because there’s no new work by the artist,” he told us. The curatorial advisory committee is in charge of selection; if the committee approaches a gallery with an interest in one of their artists, the gallery can’t counteroffer with a different artist without the approval of the committee. Other factors too may contribute: the artist may be working on a different project, or a New York-based gallery may prefer to do a local fair. “Honestly, nobody says ‘I’m not going to do it’,” Orozobekov concluded.

The committee is a unique feature of Moving Image: it selects the artists and galleries that participate, but is not involved in the commercial aspect of the fair. Those concerns fall on the organizers, who are hoping an increased number of new works will boost sales. “This year we have five to seven new works that will premiere at the fair. In New York we had three or four,” Orozobekov told AFC , adding that there would also be a handful of artists presenting the latest edition of existing series.

As for the fair itself, the London iteration will retain the same ethos that sparked the New York fair. “Our goal is to give freedom to our visitors,” Orozobekov told us, “Same thing for dealers: we give them flexibility.” Unlike stifling behemoth fairs like the Armory, Moving Image strives to create a convivial space (and lots of it) in which both dealers and visitors are left to their own devices.

The fair responds both to how video is commonly exhibited and how viewers like to experience it. There are no booths. Dealers, who are encouraged to do other things, aren’t around to hover or interrupt the visitors’ viewing with a sales pitch. This year’s London edition is coming up next month, housed in Bargehouse, a four-story industrial space in the South Bank that Orozobekov compared to PS1, is coming up next month. It will run (free to the public) parallel to the much larger (not free) Frieze London on October 17-20. On opening night, Bring Your Own Beamer (BYOB), a series of DIY video exhibitions, will invite a couple dozen under-represented artists to exhibit alongside the fair’s participants. At the fair’s close, the Moving Image Award will fund the acquisition of a work by the winner by the 53 Art Museum in Guangzhou, China.